Category Archives: Religion and theology

Teach your children well

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The title, of course, comes from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but the theme is as old as history, going back at least to Deuteronomy 6. Unfortunately, too often the church does a poor job of this. It’s not that the curricula we use aren’t effective—most of those that I know are; nor is it that they don’t teach children good things, for those which I’ve used certainly do. Nor am I saying that churches use them poorly, for though I’m sure a notable percentage of churches do, I have no reason to think that that’s broadly true. I can, however, second the point that John Walton recently made on the Zondervan Academic blog: most of our curricula in the American church do a brutally lousy job with Scripture. Dr. Walton does a good job of laying out the ways in which common American curricula misuse, misinterpret and misapply the Word of God, and especially of hammering home the reason why we should care:

If we are negligent of sound hermeneutics when we teach Bible to children, should it be any wonder that when they get into youth groups, Bible studies and become adults in the church, that they do not know how to derive the authoritative teaching from the text?

We all have a working hermeneutic, even though most have never taken a course. Where do we learn it? We learn it from those we respect. For many people this means that they learn their hermeneutics from their Sunday school teachers. Teachers in turn teach what is put into their hands. Perhaps we ought to be more attentive how Sunday school curriculum is teaching our children to find the authoritative teaching of God in the stories.

 

Photo of The Magic Hour by Dirk Joseph © 2019 Elvert Barnes.  License:  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.

What “your best life now” looks like in practice

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John Stackhouse noted the other day that a lot of Christians don’t care about theology because they think it’s a dull, dry subject which has nothing to do with their lives. (I would note in response, as a sidebar, that these aren’t people who took theology from Dr. Stackhouse.) The problem is, theology is supposed to point us somewhere, and lead us somewhere; as J. I. Packer always insisted, theology should lead to doxology (praising God), and good theology does, but bad theology leads us somewhere else instead. Even the self-help-self-gratification theology of so much pop evangelicalism, which some would say is harmless, isn’t.As Jared points out, this is the lesson of the flap over Victoria Osteen’s alleged assault of an airline stewardess. Whether or not she was actually guilty of any sort of assault, what comes through loud and clear is her sense of entitlement, and her husband’s. As Jared put it,

That’s how Osteen and his variety of prosperity gospelism position Christian identity—to be better, higher, more favored by the world than anybody else. It is a position of entitlement.And it is the antithesis of grace.

And when that’s how you view yourself and your relation to the world, then you don’t live the life of humble service to which Jesus calls us; you don’t walk the road of self-sacrifice that ends in the cross; and your idea of Christian witness is not martyrdoom but one-upsmanship. It’s bad practice, and it’s born out of bad theology.

The evangelical heresy and the gospel antidote

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It’s been said by someone, I forget whom (though it may have been my old theology professor, the late Dr. Stan Grenz—it sounds like him), that the evangelical heresy is believing in our creeds rather than in Jesus. We affirm our creeds and our confessions as expressions of what we believe, and as expressions which unite us with other Christians, but we don’t believe in them, only through them. Our belief is, and must always be, in God as revealed in Jesus Christ.When we lose sight of that fact, we get into trouble, as the Rev. Dr. Ray Ortlund points out, because “no matter how well argued our position is biblically, if it functions in our hearts as an addition to Jesus, it ends up as a form of legalistic divisiveness.” This is what he dubs “Galatian sociology,” the sociological error of the Galatian church. Even if you believe all the right things, if you believe in those things rather than in Jesus, then you are in effect adding those things to Jesus (the error C. S. Lewis called “Christianity And”); the inevitable consequence of that is division from other Christians, and the exaltation of ourselves and our own positions at the expense of others. In contrast to that,

What unifies the church is the gospel. What defines the gospel is the Bible. What interprets the Bible correctly is a hermeneutic centered on Jesus Christ crucified, the all-sufficient Savior of sinners, who gives himself away on terms of radical grace to all alike. What proves that that gospel hermeneutic has captured our hearts is that we are not looking down on other believers but lifting them up, not seeing ourselves as better but grateful for their contribution to the cause, not standing aloof but embracing them freely, not wishing they would become like us but serving them in love (Galatians 5:13).My Reformed friend, can you move among other Christian groups and really enjoy them? Do you admire them? Even if you disagree with them in some ways, do you learn from them? What is the emotional tilt of your heart—toward them or away from them? If your Reformed theology has morphed functionally into Galatian sociology, the remedy is not to abandon your Reformed theology. The remedy is to take your Reformed theology to a deeper level. Let it reduce you to Jesus only. Let it humble you. Let this gracious doctrine make you a fun person to be around. The proof that we are Reformed will be all the wonderful Christians we discover around us who are not Reformed. Amazing people. Heroic people. Blood-bought people. People with whom we are eternally one—in Christ alone.

The heavy yoke of self-justification

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At the Synod of the Church of England at York Minster last month, just before the Lambeth Conference, the Archbishop of Canterbury preached a brave and important sermon—brave and important because he sought to apply the truth of Scripture to the situation in which the Anglican Communion finds itself. In so doing, he offered some characterizations of different parties within Anglicanism with which I don’t agree, but any such quibbles are secondary; the core of his message was wise and deeply biblical. This is in keeping with what I’ve come to expect from Dr. Rowan Williams: even when he arrives at positions with which I disagree (as he fairly often does), he consistently gets there for the right reasons.  That’s as true as ever in this sermon, which is at heart a meditation on the ways in which we try to replace Jesus’ well-fitted yoke with (in the words of one of the Desert Fathers) “the heavy yoke of self-justification.”

There’s a phrase to ponder—a heavy yoke of self-justification. That’s the law, that’s the curse. That’s the waterless pit indeed—where we struggle ceaselessly, unrelentingly, to make ourselves more right, and to lay hold upon our future. We lay upon ourselves a heavy yoke, from which only the grace of Jesus Christ can deliver us. In a nutshell, we lay upon ourselves the yoke of desperate seriousness about ourselves.

And Christ’s promise is so difficult because it’s so simple. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, as the novelist says, that is what Christ offers to us: receiving it is hard. Naaman of Assyria when he came to Elisha to be healed of his leprosy, could not believe that the answer was easy. There must be something complicated for him to do. There must be some magic to be done. The word alone, “release” is not enough. We long for, we are in love with the heavy yoke of self justification. Naaman wanted to go away from Elisha, able to say, “Well I had some part in that—I did the difficult things the prophet asked me”. And Elisha, in the name of God, tells him to do something simple, to immerse himself in the mercy of God. And when Jesus says, “Our yoke is easy and my burden is light”, that is what he says, to all of us as individuals, to us as a Synod, to us as a Church, to us as a society, to us as a human world: lay aside the obsession to possess the future, receive the word of promise, here. And that’s why, as Jesus himself says in the gospel, that’s why only some people really do hear the word easily—only the tax collectors and the sinners. . . .

He alone rests in that eternal, unifiable life. That is why he says, “Come to me and I will give you rest; I will give you sight; I will bring you hope.””My yoke is easy; my burden is light”, which is why we need to be where he is, nowhere else, where he is with the Father.

This is a sermon to read (or listen to; video is available below and on the page with the transcript) with our hearts wide open, that the Spirit may use it to bring us to repentance, and to greater wisdom.

HT: Alan Jacobs

 

Photo:  “Strongman Event:  the Yoke Race,” 2010, Artur Andrzej.  Public domain.

The myth of choice

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As I’m continuing my “catch-up tour,” I dove back into Confessing Evangelical, John Halton’s blog, this afternoon; John’s a British Lutheran, and his blog is one of the deepest I know, especially but not only theologically. It’s really not an easy one to catch up on—far better to stay abreast of it, really—but I’m enjoying getting back into it. I particularly appreciate his newest post, “I choose, therefore I am,” in which he addresses “the myth of personal autonomous choice—that our decisions are free, conscious, independent, entirely ours alone”—and the difficulty we have in combating that myth. I think his conclusion is particularly important (it’s something I tell my congregation fairly often):

I am not denying that we make true choices, and that those are truly our choices. However, what I am saying is we need to be more suspicious of our choices, and more aware of the forces that are at work in influencing them.

Wise words. I encourage you to read the rest of it.

The Dark Knight of the soul

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“My subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.”—Flannery O’ConnorI have not seen The Dark Knight, nor did I ever really intend to; I don’t watch all that many movies (though it’s nice to be able to see them in the theater again), and I’ve never been a Batman fan. It does sound like a remarkable movie, though, judging from the reviews—and, no less, from the arguments over it in the Christian blogosphere. I know Thinklings Phil and Jared loved it, and I know Brant Hansen hated it, and their reactions seem to be pretty much representative. The most interesting response, though, has to have been the question Grant Thomas asked:What would Flannery O’Connor think?As he points out, given her artistic philosophy and her view of what it takes to communicate the reality of sin and grace to an unbelieving world, there’s good reason to think that she would have approved of the movie.

I think Flannery would say that Joker shows us that the world we are living in is in the territory of the devil. . . .I think in light of what I’ve been reading from Flannery O’Connor, that she would applaud the film for showing evil for what it is. Not only does it make evil look evil (rather than funny like in the old Adam West TV series), but I think Flannery would say that we need the Joker to realize how much we need grace. We need him to wear make up to realize that this kind of person should seem out of place in our world when most of the time we simply think this sort of thing is normal or at least tolerable.

As I said, I haven’t seen the movie to be able to judge, but what Grant says here makes sense to me. Read the whole post, including his several quotations from Flannery O’Connor, and see what you think.HT: Joyce

The things we leave behind

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The road which the church is called to walk as we follow Jesus Christ toward the kingdom of God is a road rather like the Oregon Trail: it leads to someplace better, but it isn’t an easy road. Back in the days of the Oregon Trail, families heading west often started off with far too much baggage; when they hit the Rockies, they found they had to leave many of their things behind, or else they wouldn’t make it across the mountains, and so along the trail one could find tables, beds, dressers, and other pieces of furniture abandoned by families who needed to lighten the load. The road behind Jesus is similarly littered. Matthew and Zacchaeus left behind their tax booths, and the fortunes they had stolen. Simon and Andrew, James and John, left behind their boats, and the family business. St. Francis of Assisi left behind a rich inheritance. John Newton, the author of “Amazing Grace,” left behind the slave trade. Sundar Singh left behind his religion and his family.

Some of the things God calls us to give up if we are to follow him are sinful, some aren’t; some are easy to give up, while others are bitterly difficult to let go. Some are harmful in themselves, while others merely absorb time and energy to no real gain. But all of them are things which compete with his will in our lives, and so they are things which we need to lay aside if we want to follow Jesus on his road. The work of discipleship is, ultimately, the work of aligning ourselves with the grain of God’s will, and against the grain of everything that competes with his will—including many of our own desires, and many of the world’s expectations. The good news is, as Michael Card and Scott Roley wrote a couple decades ago, that there is freedom to be found if we leave all these things behind to follow our Lord.

Things We Leave Behind

There sits Simon, foolish and wise;
Proudly he’s tending his nets.
Then Jesus calls, and the boats drift away,
And all that he owns he forgets.
More than the nets he abandoned that day,
He found that his pride was soon drifting away.

It’s hard to imagine the freedom we find
From the things we leave behind.

Matthew was mindful of taking the tax,
And pressing the people to pay.
Hearing the call, he responded in faith
And followed the Light and the Way.
Leaving the people so puzzled, he found
The greed in his heart was no longer around.

It’s hard to imagine the freedom we find
From the things we leave behind.

Bridge
Every heart needs to be set free from possessions that hold it so tight
‘Cause freedom’s not found in the things that we own—
It’s the power to do what is right.
With Jesus our only possession, then giving becomes our delight,
And we can’t imagine the freedom we find
From the things we leave behind.

We show a love for the world in our lives
By worshipping goods we possess;
Jesus said, “Lay all your treasures aside,
And love God above all the rest.”
‘Cause when we say “No” to the things of the world,
We open our hearts to the love of the Lord, and

It’s hard to imagine the freedom we find
From the things we leave behind.
Oh, and it’s hard to imagine the freedom we find
From the things we leave behind.

Words and music: Michael Card and Scott Roley
© 1986 Whole Armour Publishing

Skeptical conversations, part VIII: The gifts of the Spirit

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Continuing the conversation . . . Parts I-VII here. Also, I’ve updated the credo Wordle post.

But this is starting to move me into ecclesiology—the doctrine of the church—and I’m not done talking about the Spirit yet. If the first element of the Spirit’s work is to reveal the Father and the Son, the second comes at the point of conversion. It is the Son who atoned for our sins on the cross, but it is the Spirit who mediates that to us.

A: What do you mean by that?

R: The work of conversion is the work of the Spirit. It is he who moves us to conviction that we have sinned, and he who calls us to repentance; and it is he who applies the saving work of Christ to us, who sets us free from sin and regenerates us. From that point on, then, the Spirit of God lives within us, which is the third thing which must be said about his work. The Spirit brings us into the fellowship of the Trinity, bearing our prayers to Jesus, interceding for us when we do not know what to pray, and speaking to us in return; and as he began our transformation by bringing us new life, so he works to continue that transformation, nurturing that new life in us and making us more and more like Jesus.

A: And you say this process is going on in every Christian?

R: Yes.

A: I would think, if that were so, that I would see more evidence of that. I can’t say that I see very much.

R: In part, I’d say that there are many who call themselves Christian and aren’t saved; Jesus made it very clear that this would be the case. Certainly there are some remarkable perversions of the gospel out there.

A: Such as that church with their picket signs that say “God Hates Fags”?

R: Ahh, yes, Fred Phelps and his “church.” They do make the rest of us look rather bad, don’t they? But of course, I have to be careful in saying that—I know full well that I make Christians and the church look bad sometimes; and if spiritual pride, which is the sin of the Pharisees, is a subtler sort of betrayal, it’s no less poisonous for all that. Indeed, since it tends to creep in when we do something good, if we don’t watch it pride can corrupt all our victories. That illustrates, I think, the other point that needs to be made, which is that sanctification—the process of becoming holy—is a long, hard fight.

In truth, you might say that it’s two processes side by side. One is the unceasing war on sin, the work of putting sin to death; the other is what you might call the positive element, which is the work of nurturing the good. They are closely interwoven, of course, since our soul is going to grow something, whether it is good or bad; clearing out the weeds is an important part of caring for the good plants, while efforts to kill weeds are rather pointless without trying to grow something valuable in their place. Both, however, are the work of the Spirit in us, and both are also our work; once again, we have that combination. Paul puts it this way in Philippians 2:12-13: “Work out your salvation in fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.”

A: Interesting. I’ve heard people talk about the Holy Spirit before, but only Pen­tecostals, and they seemed more interested in justifying some fairly odd behavior.

R: Ahh, yes. Well, through his Spirit God has given his people gifts to contribute to the work of the church. Note that well, because a lot of Christians don’t really realize it: these are gifts of the Spirit to the church, not just to the individual, and so they aren’t necessarily new to the person who uses them. Some of the gifts of the Spirit are natural abilities which he blesses—administration, for example, or leadership.

A: Administration is a gift of the Spirit?

R: Well, it’s included in a list of them in 1 Corinthians 12. After all, running a church isn’t any easier than running a business; I can testify from personal experience that having someone gifted in that respect to take care of administrative tasks is a great blessing. It might not seem “spiritual,” but it’s a real asset to the ministry of the church. Anyway, many of the gifts of the Spirit are what you might call natural gifts—the gift of teaching is another example—but the supernatural gifts, such as prophecy, healing and tongues, tend to be the ones that draw the attention. It’s understandable, as they’re somewhat spectacular and tend to provoke strong reactions one way or the other.

A lot of people hold that the Spirit doesn’t give these gifts anymore, but I don’t think that argument holds water. The arguments from Scripture for this position are questionable at best, and the experience of the church worldwide doesn’t support it. For what it’s worth, my own experience doesn’t either, as I have seen the gifts of prophecy, healing, tongues, and words of knowledge and wisdom used to build up and strengthen the church; so for all those reasons, I believe that the Spirit still gifts his people in those ways.

That said, it is clear that there is great potential for self-deception and counterfeit gifts, and so it becomes very important to test any apparent supernatural gift. For example, one of my NT professors in college was a Pentecostal (as were all of my NT professors in seminary; rather an odd thing, that), and her rule for dealing with any apparent prophecy was not to trust it unless the Scripture supported it. Indeed, most of the time I have seen someone receive a word for a church or another person, it has been a word of Scripture—which would be a case of the Spirit directing the application of the text he inspired. I wouldn’t want to establish that as a typical means of exegeting Scripture—

A: Sorry, what does that mean?

R: My apologies—force of habit. Exegesis is the process of drawing out the meaning of a biblical text. It goes together with hermeneutics, which is the process of interpreting that meaning for and applying it to the needs and concerns of one’s audience. Rough definitions. Anyway, I’m a believer in careful exegesis supported by careful and detailed study of the Bible, and just because someone quotes Scripture doesn’t necessarily mean what they say is from the Spirit––the Devil knows the Bible, too, after all. The key is whether the statement offered is in line with the whole of Scripture, not just one proof-text; but then, that goes for all our efforts to interpret the Bible, all of which should be illuminated by the Spirit.

In any case, just to summarize: yes, I believe that the Spirit still gives people supernatural gifts, but these must be tested when they manifest themselves to ensure that they are truly from the Spirit of God. It seems to me, though, that to deny that he can or will give such gifts is rooted in our discomfort with them, and that such a denial is in essence an attempt to limit God, to make him more comfortable and predictable—and that is always a dangerous thing to do.

A: You seem to be a firm believer in a dangerous God.

R: I’m not sure “dangerous” is the right word; I would say “perilous,” perhaps because that’s the word Tolkien uses in The Lord of the Rings to describe those who are good and beautiful beyond the ability of mere mortals to handle. I like the way the writer Annie Dillard put it:

Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offence, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”—and I don’t think “fear” just means “respect.” He loves us, but everything about him is so much greater than we are that even his love for us is perilous—we cannot accept it and remain unchanged. Or as Lewis always has it said in Narnia, he’s not a tame lion. Good beyond imagining, but anything but tame.

A: I’m beginning to think that you’re a Christian for the same reason you’re a Tolkien fan.

R: Good, but backwards: I’m a Tolkien fan for the same reason I’m a Christian. For that matter, so was Tolkien, I think. But the thirst for God is primary, and underlies every other desire for that which is good and true and beautiful, and most especially the longing for something more, because God is the source of all that is good and true and beautiful, and because St. Augustine was right—our hearts are restless until they rest in him.

A: Either that or it’s the evolutionary impulse pushing us forward.

R: You could look at it that way, of course. In any case, I want to go back to my assertion that the gifts of the Spirit are gifts not primarily to the individuals who receive them but to the church. We often don’t think of them that way; we think of them as “my gifts,” even if we realize that we have been given them in order to build up the church. But it’s clear from the contexts in which these gifts are mentioned that they are truly gifts to the church through its individual members; the lists in Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12, for instance, occur together with Paul’s description of the church as the body of Christ, in which all the members fit together and each has a role to fill. But while this doesn’t fit our individualistic culture, it does fit the biblical understanding of the church, which is that God calls individuals not as lone wolves but as members of a larger community. His covenant is not with individuals as such but with a people.

Hypocrites at Panera

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I’ve gotten the chance this week, among other things, to catch back up on some of the blogs I try to follow; this post over at Between Two Worlds made my jaw drop. Do they really not see the disconnect here? I won’t even try to comment; just go read it for yourself.